Yeah, because if Voldemort ever captures Harry and then he uses his jaguar form to make a break for it, I'm sure the Death Eaters won't go after it. Bristol's practically shitting jaguars. They'd just assume he was a local that wandered too close to Malfoy manor. It would be so easy to blend in.

Maybe if the author showed some restraint and made him a beagle or some kind of sparrow or hawk, something that was smaller than a person and could easily slip through bars or bindings, then sure, keep it a secret. But you know goddamn well they don't. They'll make him a basilisk or a dragon. I don't care how many terrorist Saurons were after me, if I could turn into a dragon any time I wanted, I'd never walk anywhere ever again. You really expect a fifteen year old boy to keep the fact that he can turn into a goddamn motherfucking dragon a secret? Especially when he doesn't have to?

A fic where Harry gets desperate enough to gamble on his animagus form after his name comes out of the cup and then uses "I'm a dragon" to solve every task in the Triwizard tournament would be infinitely more entertaining than all this dime-a-dozen halfassed cloak and dagger shit.

Some of you have a tendency to forget where Harry Potter ends and Alastor Moody begins.

 

My god, I take everything back.

This needs to happen. No pussyfooting about with trying to hide his abilities while being attacked by the dragon in the first task. Just transform and go to town. Dragon on dragon battle is potentially amazing.

I'm unsure of quite how the dragon form works on the second task. It's a good job that Harry's the first multi-animagus since Merlin and Morgana's love-child. He's also a giant squid! (or kraken). Once again, fuck shit up.

Oh, a hedge maze? How cute. Cue reducing the entire maze to cinders and getting the cup before the other champions even get to enter.

 

I'm looking forward to seeing a fic where Voldemort is the dragon animagus. The Battle of Hogwarts will look more like the Spartans at Thermopylae.

 

You must have a very different interpretation of Thermopylae than I do.

Even 300 didn't go that far.

 

"All we can hope for is a defiant loss so moving that it inspires others to take up arms."

 

I'm sorry, but having just reread the Hobbit, I couldn't help but snort to myself over that.

You must be unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons.

 

Wolf is probably the best balance of cool and realistic you're going to get. It would even make sense that it was black, because Harry's hair is black and it seems that that plays some role when the animal's color is variable, as with Sirius.

 

I wouldn't call a wolf realistic. Making Harry Wolfaboo/10 is almost worse than making him a blatantly magical sue creature like a silver gryphon or whatever.

I'd bet my life that he could fly, and he wouldn't be a bird of prey either, because it's not in his nature or personality.

Realistically, he'd most likely be an osprey, rail, crake, or something similar.

If you want to be really specific, he might be a skuas. That's a type of bird that chases other birds and forces them to drop their catches, taking them for their own. Sound familiar?

 

Raine reminded me of this fic: Enter The Dragon

Too bad it's never going to be completed.

 

What I'd like to know is how is it possible for the process to still be one inherently grounded in Transfiguration (i.e. no 'mysticism' involved), and yet also be the sort of thing where you have no idea what you'll become and no actual control over it.

What do you do, just keep transfiguring yourself to try and find the shape that has the least amount of resistance or something? But wouldn't that mean somebody could 'force' their form to be something else if they didn't like what they got?

We know it's a lot of work to become one, but we also know a bunch of kids still in school can also accomplish it. It's even possible for someone with little to know magical talent in Transfiguration (Peter) to manage it if they have help from others. So what exactly is involved? Some of the things we know about it seem somewhat self-contradictory.

 

I've always imagined Transfiguration as a discipline grounded not in knowledge of specific transformations between objects so much as an understanding of more generalized philosophical principles (think McGonagall answering the Ravenclaw Riddle in DH).

There is also the idea that knowledge of the self (and the dynamics of how it interacts with the subconscious), or one's own being, isn't necessarily mysticism.

These two things combined (self-knowledge and the comprehension of more generalized transfigurative mechanics) might allow one to achieve a form that hasn't yet been revealed.

As for Peter, even slower kids can be brought up to speed with patient tutoring.

 

Actually, we are never told that Peter was incompetent in school.

Hate to break it to you, but that's completely fanon.

The only thing about him is that he was James' #1 fan, but we are never shown that he was incompetent at magic.

 

Doesn't McGonagall shit on him in PoA for lacking talent? Hm.

 

McGonagall in PoA:

"Hero-worshipped Black and Potter, -- Never quite in their league, talent-wise. -- Stupid boy ... foolish boy ... he was always hopeless at dueling"

 

Funny she should say hopeless at Dueling, apart from the one time in CoS, we never see or hear of Students dueling (apart from illegal DA meetings). Was that a part of schooling back then?

 

Along with hanging students from chains in the dungeon? Maybe.

Filch liked it better in the good ol' days...

 

Considering the number of fights that Snape and the Marauders seemed to get into, it is entirely possible that she'd seen enough fights Peter was involved in to conclude that he wasn't a good duellist.

 

She could also be coloring her perception based (possibly) on his facility with written assignments, her memory of his personality, and a bit of "poor Peter" nostalgia at his having met his end by the wand of the evil Sirius Black. Teachers aren't always the most impartial judges of character or talent.

There's plenty of canon evidence that Pettigrew was clever and competent at magic (Animagus, Killing Curse facility, ability to craft a homunculus body for Voldemort, ability to craft Voldemort's resurrection brew, ability to cast a mega-blasting curse under duress, ability to lure Bertha Jorkins to her demise in Albania after she recognized him, etc.)

 

Well, I think dueling has very little to do with general skill in magic. There's no shortage of one-hit-win spells in Harry Potter; you don't need to be skilled with some bad-ass super difficult arcane magic only found after spending years in musty libraries to be able to totally dominate someone who hesitates even a fraction of a second before acting. And Pettigrew doesn't seem to be the most decisive of people.

On the original topic, I think the perfect animagus form for Harry is some kind of relatively ordinary, unassuming looking bird, perhaps some type of a crow. Both because it fits the "natural flier"-trope, and because it's one of the few (non-magical) forms that might have a plausible relevance to a plot.

 

Box jellyfish.